Are you looking for the best SMTP transactional email services?
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) makes sure your transactional emails are delivered to users’ inboxes (and not the spam folder). It even lets you automate emails depending on the actions and behavior of your users.
The hard part is finding the right SMTP service since there are many email services on the market.
We’ve done the research for you and in this guide, we’ll share the best SMTP email services for marketing and automation.
1. SendLayer
SendLayer is the most reliable SMTP transactional email service. It makes sure your emails appear in the user’s inbox as fast as possible.
What we love about it is that you can easily connect and send your website emails using the SendLayer API. No complex processes.
It makes it easy for just about anyone to start sending emails and notifications that include:
- Transactional email
- Registration emails
- Confirmation emails
- Shipping notifications
- Password Resets
- Cart abandonment
Whatever you need with SMTP, SendLayer has you covered. It works seamlessly with 1000+ platforms. Some of the most popular ones include WordPress, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Joomla, Drupal, and HelpScout.
With SendLayer, you won’t have to worry about what programming language (such as PHP or Python) you use to build your site or app. Your emails will work!
It doesn’t end there. When you sign up for SendLayer, you get access to rich features like mailing lists and groups for easier management. Also, you get a detailed email log to track the full email journey to verify that your emails are making it to their destination.
Added to all this, there’s built-in analytics that you can filter by email, status, recipient, and more so you can optimize performance accordingly.
While we’ve covered the basics, SendLayer has so much more to offer. Learn more about SendLayer’s transactional SMTP service »
Price: Get started with SendLayer’s free trial. Premium plans begin at only $5 per month. Plus, it comes with a 100% no-risk money back guarantee for 14 days.
2. SMTP
SMTP is the most powerful email delivery service on the market. It lets you send and track high volumes of emails. And it has a highly responsive infrastructure that ensures speedy deliveries without any delays.
SMTP lets you send all types of transactional emails as well as marketing emails. This includes automated emails like order confirmations, shipping notifications, order status updates, user authentication, and password resets.
With this service, your email process will be smooth and seamless to improve user experience on your site. Plus, all plans come with a Reputation defender (add-on). This monitors your email list health and safeguards you against both soft and hard bounces
The setup and integration process is quick and straightforward so you can start sending emails immediately. Plus, it gives you access to comprehensive reports on your email delivery and engagement performance.
SMTP suits all kinds and sizes of businesses and it lets you can scale your email volume as your business grows. It’s hands down the best SMTP relay and email delivery service worldwide.
Price: The basic plan costs $25 per month. You can try out the service for free for 30 days with a limit of 50,000 emails.
3. Brevo
Brevo (formerly SendinBlue) is a popular email marketing platform. You can send transactional emails to your subscribers’ lists and track the emails to find out the open rate, bounce rate, click rate, etc. Brevo also offers SMS marketing service to send promotional and transactional messages.
One thing that stands out about Brevo is that they manage SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) signatures through their domain names. This is a technical standard that helps protect email senders and recipients from spam, spoofing, and phishing.
Other notable features include drag and drop email builder, welcome emails, confirmation emails, A/B testing for emails, and advanced reporting for an optimized email marketing campaign.
Price: 300 emails/day with unlimited contacts are free. Starting cost for the basic plan is $25 per month.
4. Mailgun
Mailgun is a powerful email service provider for professional developers. It offers high email deliverability, and with its powerful APIs, you can send, receive and track transactional emails easily.
Mailgun even has advanced email validation to increase your conversions.
It features a robust sending infrastructure with SMTP integration and a simple RESTful API to send bulk emails to your users.
When you sign up for Mailgun, you get access to responsive transactional email templates that are ready to edit and use. You can use the drag and drop editor to quickly create stunning emails without using HTML and CSS. Mailgun also comes with easy-to-use email marketing tools like segmentation, personalization, and A/B testing.
Price: It’s free for 30 days with a limit of 5,000 messages. After the trial, by default, you’ll be moved to the Foundation 50K plan which costs $35 per month. You can also choose your own plan or opt for a pay-as-you-go service.
5. SendGrid
SendGrid is a cloud-based SMTP transactional email provider that comes with a reliable platform to send and receive bulk emails with high delivery rates.
Aside from sending transactional emails, they also allow you to create email marketing campaigns. You can create an exceptional email program using the email API option to deliver emails at scale.
It comes with a variety of integration options for you to start sending emails. You can get a complete analytics and metrics report and real-time feedback on every email you sent.
If you’re looking to use a dedicated IP address for email sending, SendGrid offers this under their Pro Email API plan or an Advanced Marketing Campaigns plan.
Price: In the first month, you can send 40,000 emails for free. After that, it offers 100 emails/day forever free plan. The essential plan starts at $19.95 per month for up to 50,000 emails per month. The price increases with the number of emails you need to send.
6. Postmark
Postmark by ActiveCampaign is one of the best SMTP transactional email services that offer lightning-fast delivery for your application and transactional emails. Postmark has SMTP servers distributed around the world to ensure fast email delivery.
It has an excellent tracking system that allows you to monitor how many emails are opened and how much time is spent on the email you send.
Price: The basic plan costs $15 per month for 10,000 emails. You’ll need to pay $1.80 per 1,000 emails for additional emails.
7. Moosend
Moosend is an affordable SMTP transactional email service that comes with a drag and drop email builder to design your transactional emails instantly. It has a whopping deliverability rate of 98%, which means it can combat spam filters.
It allows you to create an email blast and tracks the emails in real time. You can also get advanced analytics reports for your transactional emails.
One thing to remember is that Moosend only has a form to get in touch with the support team. There’s no phone, email, or chat support.
Price: It’s free for 30 days. After that, it starts at $9 per month for 500 subscribers. You’ll get it at $7 per month if you choose to bill annually. All plans offer unlimited emails and campaigns each month.
8. Amazon SES
Amazon SES is a flexible and scalable SMTP transactional email service, which is primarily geared towards application developers and digital marketers. Amazon SES helps you easily send notifications and transactional emails to your users. It allows you to use the SMTP interface or an Amazon SES API to integrate Amazon SES directly into your application.
It comes with a robust system and functionality that makes sure your emails ignore the spam filters. You can track email delivery, bounce rate, and rejections through their smart mechanism.
Price: It’s a pay-as-you-go service, which means you’ll need to pay for what you use. It allows you to send 62,000 emails per month for free. After the free limit, you’ll need to pay $0.10 for every 1,000 emails. If your emails include attachments, then you’ll have to pay $0.12 per GB.
9. Mailchimp Transactional Email
Transactional Email, formerly called Mandrill, is an SMTP transactional email service by MailChimp. It’s a secure and efficient platform to send transactional emails without any delivery issues. You can use Transactional Email to send data-driven, targeted, personalized, and eCommerce emails to your users.
With its advanced tracking, you can monitor the open rate, bounce rate, and click rate for your emails. Added to that, the Mailchimp platform gives you access to email templates and email campaigns for better marketing strategies.
Price: There’s a forever free plan with 2,500 emails and 500 contacts. It costs $6.50 for 5,000 emails/month. The cost increases with the number of emails and subscribers you have.
That’s our list of the best SMTP services. If you’re looking for more options, there’s MailJet and SparkPost. Keep in mind that Gmail is not a good option for transactional emails. They have many restrictions and you’ll likely face a ton of hiccups with your emails.
It’s best to use a dedicated SMTP service. Now since this is a long list, you may still be wondering which is the best one. We give you our verdict below.
What are the best transactional email services?
When choosing the best SMTP service, you’ll want to look at important factors:
- Sender reputation
- Scalable infrastructure
- Marketing automation
- Free email plans and affordable paid plans
- Detailed reporting and email analytics
Every SMTP service in this list has something unique to offer, but the one that comes out on top are SendLayer and SMTP.com. They check all the right boxes and have everything you need in an SMTP service including a robust setup, high delivery rates, and a reliable support team.
For reliable email delivery on a small scale, SendLayer is our #1 pick. If you need more power to send a huge number of emails, SMTP.com is the best for that.
We hope this article helped you find the best SMTP transactional email services. If you’re using WordPress, you may want to check out WP Mail SMTP. It helps fix any email delivery issues you might be facing on your site.
Follow our tutorial here » How to Set Up and Configure SMTP in WordPress. We also have a guide specifically for WooCommerce stores » How to Fix WooCommerce Email Issues.
Up next, you may want to see the best CRM software for small businesses.
You’ll also want to check out these related resources:
- Best Email Newsletter Plugins for WordPress
- How to Set Up the Right Form Notification Emails
- How to Grow Your Email List With Social Proof Notifications
These posts will help you create an email marketing strategy that works wonders for your online business.
WPSMTP works flawlessly for me. I use the “other” selector and add my email host credentials. Done. Just remember if you change your password to also change it in your WPSMTP settings.